“I knew we needed help because although we had a good-sized team to support our exponential growth, things were still falling through the cracks,” Kinaxis CHRO Megan Paterson explained. “It felt as if we were tripping over ourselves.”
“Everyone just wanted to help out, but it just wasn’t efficient and it wasn’t optimized,” says Paterson. Kinaxis has always put its people first, and with rapid growth and continued success, they wanted to ensure their HR department was able to scale for future growth without compromising on the service and standards they had already come accustomed to delivering, and employees and leaders had come to expect.
Stratford's 20 month partnership with Kinaxis to evolve and execute their new HR vision was recently profiled in an article in the Ottawa Business Journal which shares details of how Stratford, working alongside the Kinaxis team, familiarized themselves with the current people, processes and technology in HR, working from the inside-out to identify areas for improvement and success.
Also featured in the article is lead of People and Culture Strategy Consulting at Stratford Group, Neil Crawford, who understood that there was a great opportunity to set a clear course for HR to support the company’s future growth. This included developing an HR Service Delivery Model and organizational design of HR at Kinaxis to ensure that everyone was aligned on how HR services would be delivered and roles and responsibilities were clearly defined.
“It was a big change for many on the team...But in the end, team members had a new-found confidence that comes with clearly understanding their role and the role of others in delivering value and achieving outcomes.” said Crawford.
At the same time, Stratford knew it needed to help Kinaxis safeguard their future growth and transformation. “A lot of information was being carried around in the heads of HR team members. We needed to take all the knowledge and information they’d acquired and make it visible and available to everyone at the organization,” says Crawford.
To address this concern, Stratford partnered with the Kinaxis HR, IT and Internal Communication teams to design and implement a global HR Knowledge Base and Service Management platform using an application already adopted by Kinaxis.
Now, Kinaxis can continue to grow globally, and their new processes and technology can accommodate it. The process has also strengthened the team as a result, building confidence and delivering value throughout the entire organization.
Read the full profile on the OBJ website.